Ellen DeGeneres selfie on Twitter is Oscar gold for Samsung

SAN FRANCISCO -- And the winner for best tweet: Ellen DeGeneres, who struck social-media gold for the Oscars and sponsor Samsung with the best selfie of the night.

The celebrity-filled selfie on a Samsung phone was the Twitter star of Oscar night. DeGeneres never mentioned Samsung, a major Oscars advertiser, but appeared to use the company's Galaxy Note 3 for the selfie, which was actually taken by Bradley Cooper. It was epic product placement for the Apple competitor.

Samsung, however, still has some mighty competition from the iPhone in becoming the smartphone to the stars. DeGeneres -- or at least her Twitter account -- tweeted backstage with an iPhone.

The selfie now holds the record as the most popular tweet ever, making the picture worth every dollar Samsung spent on the sponsorship.

DeGeneres’ tweet has received nearly 2.7 million retweets and nearly 1.4 million favorites. The previously most-retweeted Twitter post was by President Obama after winning his second term in 2012. That tweet got 778,000 retweets.

DeGeneres’ tweet even knocked Twitter offline for a bit, racking up more than 700,000 retweets and nearly 200,000 favorites in just 30 minutes.

Twitter declined to comment on the service glitches except for a statement on its status blog: "Between 19:05 and 19:29 PST today, some users may have experienced issues viewing and sending tweets on twitter.com and Twitter’s mobile apps. Traffic was redirected away from the components that were experiencing problems, and the issue has now been resolved."

But Twitter did celebrate DeGeneres’ record-making moment with this tweet: "The envelope please … to @TheEllenShow -- this is now the most retweeted tweet with over 1 million RTs. Congrats!"

A person familiar with the situation but not allowed to speak publicly about Twitter's Oscar night said the company had no role in the selfie and its soaring popularity was entirely "organic."

“Pretty nice placement, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Samsung working in that it was used for making that record-breaking tweet happen,” said Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land.